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Resource: The New Data Center

Network World has a package of stories titled The New Data Center that addresses energy efficiency in mission-critical facilities. There are at least eight stories, including a look at power metrics at Digital Realty Trust (DLR), which uses dollars-per-kilowatt as its key measure of the capital cost of building a data center. An excerpt:

Digital Realty developed the dollars-per-kilowatt metric in 2006 but has been using it as the key benchmark for its business since mid-2007, says Smith (Jim Smith, Digital Realty’s VP of engineering). It’s straightforward to calculate dollars-per-kilowatt: Divide the cost of the data center under construction by its kilowatts of UPS capacity, and you come up with the project’s dollars-per-kilowatt measurement. For example, a $9 million data center that provides 1000 kilowatts of UPS capacity costs $9000 per kilowatt. Using this metric, Digital Realty has found it gets better returns on low-density data centers than on high-density ones.

About the Author

Rich Miller is the founder and editor at large of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.